Michael Wolff / Todd Plitt USA TODAY

by Michael Wolff, USA TODAY

by Michael Wolff, USA TODAY

Sean Combs is at the Cannes Lions festival, representing not just himself and his interests but the intersection of personal branding and actual brands - and the present exalted status of fixers and entrepreneurs and people who can make things happen in the world of popular culture.

I was supposed to interview him Wednesday on the festival's big stage. But then I got fired after a little back-and-forth about keeping Sean "comfortable."

I would like to think I was fired because Sean Combs Googled me and got worried I might ask him about â?¦ well, almost any question you might ask the oft-accused and much-litigated-against artist, manager, producer and most successful hip-hop entrepreneur of all time. Maybe he thought things would get dicey.

But it's just as likely that Steve Stoute, a self-styled ad agency visionary at the intersection of hip-hop and American commercial life and the one who seems to have organized this event, decided he alone wanted to be the interviewer.

Curiously, Stoute, who is a conduit to a variety of other acts and cultural moguls of no less standing than Lady Gaga and Jay-Z, was once famously (well, in some circles) assaulted by Combs with a champagne bottle. There were assault charges and an out-of-court settlement. But, as it turned out, this incident helped to make Stoute's career, and he and Combs are tight now.

Both Stoute and Combs are curiosities in the ad business and at Cannes. Combs himself was on the terrace of the Carlton hotel Tuesday, adding glamour and frisson to a closely packed cocktail hour - and physically helping to move chairs around.

Although Stoute and Combs are outliers, there is also some acknowledgment and perhaps irritation that they are making more money from advertising than most everybody else. Stoute has actually morphed his fixer and middle-man role into something that seems like a proper agency with some big-name clients. And Combs, like Jay-Z, has put himself into probably the highest-margin sweet spot of the market-meeting complex, wherein his endorsement is something like a bankable currency.

It used to be that brands chose endorsers. But now higher-value endorsers choose brands and often manage to snag the one thing the ad business has never managed to obtain: a piece of the action.

In a world without advertising, these embodiments of endorsement, these cultural arbiters and managers, these, well, whatever they are, become ever-more valuable and hold more and more of the cards. Endorsers become owners.

I really wanted to ask Sean Combs what he thinks of most of the marketing people and ad men he's met. Useful tools or just benighted fools?

And I wanted to ask about irony. Does he have any?

So perhaps he was right to fire me. When the party is going strong, you really don't want to stop and analyze why it's all so fabulous.